Will Trump's Tucker Show be a Big Whoop or a Whopping Wowza?

 

By Hal Brown

Trump and Tucker hope that their planned competing event  (click left or here) will get people to watch  the One True And Only Best And Greatest Now And Forever President Donald J. Trump on the latest episode of The Tucker Twitter Show instead of the GOP debate. 

If they believed there was a God who answered prayers they'd be begging for a ginormous audience instead of a big whoop, or even worse, a philosphical thought experiment of the exploration of the question "if a fatso farts in the forest and noone's there does it make any noise?" 

Obviously both Trump and Tucker want their show to be a whopping wowza and not a big whoop. It's impossible to say who wants this more, but clearly Trump needs this more than Tucker does. If it stinks or sinks, or both, they'll both tout the fact that it got the biggest audience for anything ever posted on Twitter and for once this self-aggrandizement might not be a lie.

“This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers!” Howard Beale in the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film “Network.” Of course the character's best known line is "I'm mad as hell I'm not going to take it anymore (watch video clip) but his comment about the power of television still holds true. There is a difference today. The big boob tube now competes with the Internet for influence which for most people is either the size of a cell phone screen or the size of a laptop screen.

It takes a small amount of effort to use the Internet while turning on a television and switching channels is easy. In the early days of TV you had to get up to switch channels and then we had clickers that used to acutally click and now we can just say Fox News out loud, like I did to take the above photo, and viola, there's Fox and Friends.

To find Tucker Carlson's Twitter page where he'll be presenting the glorious Trump event which he hopes is the climax of his career, call it the Orgasm in Orange, you have to do a little work. 

The most recent episode is his interview with Ramaswamy lower right.

It won't be diffiuclt for regular users of Twitter to find. The real question is whether they'll want to see Trump so badly they'll decide to do it on the little screen instead of the big screen.

Trump knows how adicted people are to their big, often giant, screen televisions. 

Click to read article

They are just like him. They love their television shows. Most of them don't read for entertainment or information. They watch television or YouTubes. This is why Trump is so outraged over the Fox News no longer functioning as his personal soapbox and megaphone, and why the preening narcissist  (read my story) is making such a fuss over the unlfattering photos they are using for screenshots of him.

This is what Trump posted on Truth Social:

"Why doesn't Fox and Friends show all of the Polls where I am beating Biden, by a lot. Also, they purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big 'orange' one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they're not."

I found it amusing that he called himself "big 'orange'' with the quotes around the word "big" when his critics sometimes call him "big orange" or mock him because of the orange tinted makeup he apparently applies to his face:

We'll have to see whether this plan works for Trump, or if he changes his mind at the last minute and decides to ditch Tucker and join the debate. The chance to prance on the big screen may be to hard to resist.

If he does the Twitter Twist and shakes his booty on Tucker's show no doubt many people will watch it instead of the TV debate on Fox News, and others may do what I did when I took the photo on the top of this blog. They may make their own version of the split screen and watch both at the same time.

I doubt I'll watch either on Wednesday. I don't know what streaming video show we'll be watching next week, but it's sure to be more entertaining than Trump and Tucker or the GOP debate. Chris Christi if the only candidate worth watching and he'll have to split his time with these yahoos:

I'll count on Morning Joe to show clips of the highlights and lowlights.

Addendum: One possiblity suggested by a former Trump advisory is that Trump will "suck all the oxygen out of the air" by turning himself in to to the authorities in Georgia during the debate and having Tucker Carlson interview him as he exits the jail.

While I think this is possible I think it is not likely because it will get more people to watch his arrest at the jail. I doubt he'll want addtional people to see him being led through the process like an ordinary criminal. This will be televised so it won't be up to courtroom artists to show how he looked. He's a good actor but pretending this doesn't bother him for the cameras may be beyond his ability.
 

More: For an indepth article read Inside Trump’s Decision to Skip the G.O.P. Debate in the NY Times, subscription required.

Excerpt:

The former president has been quizzing confidants lately about whether he should debate. He has fixated on former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is expected to be his harshest critic on the stage. And he has expressed a particularly intense disdain for the low-polling former governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, suggesting privately that it would be almost insulting to share a stage with him, according to a person who spoke to Mr. Trump.

Senior members of Mr. Trump’s team — Chris LaCivita, Jason Miller and Mr. Cheung — all plan to attend the debate. The Trump campaign has arranged for prominent surrogates, including members of Congress, to visit the “spin room” after the debate to make Mr. Trump’s case.

But as of Friday, Mr. Trump appeared to have lost interest in attending the debate, according to people with knowledge of his thinking. And he is now planning to attempt to upstage the event by participating in the interview with Mr. Carlson, though the exact timing and online platform remain unclear.

Here's a summary of the NYT article from Raw Story.

Tucker interviewed a disgusting man, Elon promoted this, it reinforces my deciding to be one of 100 million who joined Zuck's Threads

By Hal Brown

Link just to this page here.

I won't even go into who the man Tucker Calson interviewed on Twitter is and what he did. You can click here to read The Salon article about him and how desperate for attention it demonstrates Carlson is.

Amanda Marcotte's article includes this xkcd free to share cartoon:

Here's a version with a word I changed so it applies to me:

Twitter was a useful tool for communication which you could liken to the telephone before robocalls. Then a billionarie known for innovation in other fields bought it and he turned out to be a creep intent on making the popular social media platform into a megaphone for lies and hate.

Another billionaire who already owned equally popular but slightly diffrent  social media platforms launched a competitor to the creepy guy's.

Within a week 100 million people joined the new platform. I was one of them.

I admit I had one self-serving reason. This was a way to post links to my most recent blogs.

My Threads page

I had no illusions that this would lead to many, if any, new  readers. So far I have no followers. On Twitter (here), which I joined for reasons I don't remember in 2013, I have 162 followers a few of whom are well known.

My second reason for joining threads was to be one of the 100 million and take a jab at the creepy billionaire.

As the Salon article shows, the creepy billionaire's platform has become less popular since he took it over. 

Of course everyone knows the real life actors in this drama are. In the unlikely case that you don't, this is from Business Insider: Musk and Zuck promised us a cage fight, but what we've got are 2 reply guys trading petty jabs.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter I joined Mastodon (my page is here) where I've already made over 1,000 posts.

Mastodon was supposed to be a one of several Twitter killers (article)... read about their diffrences here.

Unfortuately Twitter managed to hold on even though fewer people were using it.

https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/

I just checked my Threads link and saw that The New York Tines, NPR, and CBS News had posted liks to recent articles there. 

One the main drawbacks to the Threads vs. Twitter competition is that the former can for now only be accessed through an app dowloaded to a smart phone while you can get to Twitter both on your cellphone and laptop. 

"Meta has not confirmed whether it’s working on a web app to make Threads available through a web browser. But every single major social media app – such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – is available through a web browser, so we imagine it’s only a matter of time until Thread expands to desktop." (Reference)

Twitter continues to stay high in the rankings because so many notable people from celebrities up to and including President Biden are using it to communicate. 

Taylor Swift has almost three times as many followers as President Biden:

Of course people are used to Twitter and lots of them don't care about that Musk has made it so toxic they'd spit it out like they'd just bitten into a worm in an apple. I'm still using it to promote my blog stories so I'm just talking the talk and not walking the walk. I've posted a link to this blog as a way, albeit to negligible effect, to express my opinion of Musk.

I have no way to predict whether anyone will engage my tweet and will read this as a result. I'll update this later in the day to report on this.

If you watch all 10 mins. of Tucker Carlson's first Twitter show and are like me it will be 10x longer than you've ever watched him

 

By Hal Brown

This morning I went there and watched Tucker Carlson's Twitter debut show so I could write this blog. Until now the most I'd seen of Tucker Carlson were brief segments aired on MSNBC. 

I did this after finding out about his new "show" from HUFFPOST and clicking on the link to Twitter in their article 

Tucker Carlson’s New Twitter Show, Seen By Millions, Starts With Conspiracy Theories

Click above to enlarge image

I doubt you'll do it, but you can watch the Tucker's Twitter debut by clicking here.

I am too lazy to offer a complete summary of what he said though I want to share a few impressions.

I was surprised that some of his references went so far beyond sarcasm that I wondered if they would fly like the alien UFO's he said he were in possession of the US government (along with the bodies of alien pilots) over the heads of many of his viewers. Really, he spent about two  minutes on how the "fact" that alien UFOs exist and we have been studying them and their the bodies of their pilots is the covered up story of the century.

He also explained what using tautology as a  persuasion technique was, and he accused the mainstream media of using this technique of argument incessantly when I doubt most of his viewers know what the term means. In fact, Carlson's stock in trade is tautology. Having graduated from Trinity College (ranked 39 among US liberal arts colleges) and being one of their best known alumni he certainly is familiar with the concept. Of the hundreds of notable alumni listed on Wikipedia, alas (for him) he's only number four of the 10 who are pictured as select alumni in the sidebar. He is after Christine C. Quinn, David Cage, and Dov Zakheim who aren't household names. If he ever looks at this I assume he can beat his chest over being above George Will and the creator of MyTunes.

Click above to enlarge

He managed to get in references to trans women calling them skinny dudes in dresses. 

Unanswered questions apparently trouble Carlson. For example, who organized the BLM riots, what  really happened on 911, and who killed JFK?

Although Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham got knocks, there were two primary villains in his 10 minute Twitter debut. One was the media and the other was Zelenski who he described with a string of insults saying that he was ratlike and a shifty dead-eyed man in a tracksuit.

Perhaps time limitations kept him from gushing or crushing over Putin, the dictator who likes to be photographed barechested. He didn't even mention his name.  He supports Russia in the Ukraine war. In fact, one of his segments was replayed on Russian TV:

He began his debut "show" explaining why he is sure they weren't responsible for blowing up the Kakhovka dam blaming it on Ukraine.

Describing the media toward the end of his show (I'll take the word out of quotes) he says they have stories like "here's a story about racism now go eat each other." I have no idea what he meant by now go eat each other.

How many of his regular viewers will follow him to Twitter and watch him on their Internet devices rather than on television remains to be seen. Unless Elon Musk decides to pay him I don't know how he can make much money off of this although his net worth has been estimated to be $30 million.

Of course with an ego like Tucker's maybe money isn't all that important to him.

...........................................................

Related blog from June 2nd: The unemployed TV personality who could beat Trump.

Here's a mystery. For unknown reasons all week the blog has had the largest percentage of readers logging on from Singapore. All I can think of is that this had something to do with this:

World's spy chiefs connect in secret conclave at Shangri-La Dialogue security meeting in Singapore

Click above to enlarge

IF SO:

If you don't see the Disquis comment section below it is on the bottom of the page here.

The unemployed TV personality who could beat Trump

 By Hal Brown

DonkeyHotey, InPixio

On February 26th I wrote "Tucker Carlson might be Trump's best pick to run with him for VP" when he still had a job.

This was what the main page of Salon looked like this morning:

Talk about clickbait, how could anyone not take a look at the story to find out who Ron DeSantis should fear?

Of course I took the bait and clicked:

Click above to read

The answer is in the subtitle (enlarged above) but you don't find an explanation until you read Chauncey DeVega's contention until the middle of the article:

But also because he is the only candidate in the field that will have the name ID enough to look viable to win the nomination that MAGA can accept once it becomes clear that Trump has too much indictment baggage. My expectations are that by late fall Trump will be facing multiple indictments and will begin to be seen as too risky to nomination. At this time, DeSantis is by far their most likely landing pad. The rest of the field as it currently exists is too obscure. Now, if a different MAGA flamethrower with very high name ID like Tucker Carlson was to emerge, THEN DeSantis would be in trouble.

While I still think it is possible, as I wrote back in February, that Trump could decide that Carlson would be his best choice for a VP running mate. He could announce this choice well before the GOP convention and knock out DeSantis and anyone else daring to declare against him.

The next question is what would running to be second banana to Trump give Tucker. During the campaign of course it would give him a job, albeit unsalaried. It would keep him in the limelight, hell, he'd have klieg lights on him that would be at least as bright as he had when he was at Fox News.

If he was asked to run by Trump he'd have a difficult decision to make. He'd have to consider Trump's chances of winning. He'd be looking at polls which included him as a candidate in the GOP primary and then at polls which had him running against President Biden.

If it looked like he stood a reasonable chance of beating Trump in the primary and polls showed that Biden was very likely to win the general election against him, Carlson might decide running as a probable loser wasn't worth his time and effort. 

If polls showed he could beat Trump and, crucially, stood a reasonable chance of beating Biden, my expectation is that he would run.

Assuming he became president there's no way to determine how he would govern because only he knows what he really believes today although his history dating back to college shows he was a die-in-the-wool bigot even back then. In addition to being a member of The Christian Fellowship he was involved with The Jesse Helms Foundation (Helms was an outspoken opponent of gay rights) and The Dan White Society which was named for the man who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone known for his diverse hiring, and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk. 

Trinity College yearbook

Here is some of what the GLADD Accountably Project says about him.

• He called trans children grotesque.
• He claimed that transgender women “put every woman and girl at risk of male violence.”
• He refused to apologize for using an anti-gay slur on air.
• He's criticized having women in the military.

It appears what while Trump and DeSantis promote so-called anti-woke policies which discriminate against members of the LGBTQ+ community, Carlson's distain and disgust against them is deeply rooted and goes back at least to high school when it has been reported he once beat up a gay man in a public bathroom.

While Carlson has said he has no plans to run for president and made a legal threat against a PAC which is urging him to run, this doesn't mean he actually wouldn't run if he thought he stood a chance of winning. 

Newsweek published "What a Tucker Carlson Presidency Would Look Like" last month. Here are the main points:

• The TV host would be "hard to dismiss" as a presidential candidate, according to some academics. 
• His appeal could indicate the American right is "radicalizing even beyond Trump," and seeking "a new charismatic leader."
• But others told Newsweek a Carlson presidency would be "devastating for race relations.

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Related: 

This is what Rick Wilson of The Lincoln Project thinks about Carlson running for president:

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Some thoughts about Tucker Carlson, Joe and Hunter Biden, George Santos, and Kaitlan Collins

 

On Tucker Carlson trying to build an audience on Twitter

I just don't think this will make much of a splash, more of a ripple. Fox is the only venue that could give him the kind of audience he wants. Not only this, but he needs to be on television not on a computer screen. Even if Newsmax payed him more than Fox did, thus enabling him to get on a TV screen, I doubt people will break their Fox News habit to tune into another station. A lot depends on Fox's programming during whatever time Tucker is on Newsmax.  

Bottom line, Musk needs Tucker more than Tucker needs Musk. I think Tucker is toast, stale, burnt toast and Musk is a moldy melon. Both will end up in a compost heap.

On the GOP quest to implicate President Biden in some kind of criminal activity involving his supposed consiglieri master spy Hunter Biden:

Hmmm... who are you going to believe really bad things about? Donald Trump who lived all his adult, or I should put this is George Santos fashion as his "adultish" life, as a sadistic sociopath out only for himself, or Joe Biden who possibly once transgressed by wearing mismatched socks.

While on George Santos:

While as someone with actual expertise in making psychiatric diagnoses I've concluded at Donald Trump is a malignant (sociopathic) sadistic grandiose narcissist and Hershel Walker most likely still suffers from dissociative identity disorder. I can't come up with what, if any, psychiatric disorder George Santos suffers from. He has managed to put the word "fabulist" associated with his lying into discussions about him. Thus I do give him credit for improving the vocabulary of lots of people.

Fabulist: a liar, especially a person who invents elaborate, dishonest stories: a born fabulist, with an imagination unfettered by the laws of logic and probability.

On CNN's Kaitlan Collins, dice, and the Mafia

As someone who watches MSNBC and doesn't ever tune into CNN I wasn't familiar with this so-called rising CNN star. I was talking about her with my partner and said that she could have made her bones if she'd managed to hold Trump's feet to the fire when she interviewed him. I had to explain where the idiom "make your bones" came from. For those who aren't fans of The Godfather and the Sopranos where the phase is used to describe establishing one's reputation by killing someone. 

If Collins had killed it by nailing Trump she would have made her bones. There are so many gotcha follow-up questions she could have insisted he answer. I would have liked him to explain exactly what he meant when he said E. Jean Carroll was a wack job this this often means someone is mentally ill.

While the bones derivation might come from establishing one's bona fides, I think it comes from the game of craps.Dice were originally made from actual bones. Thus making your bones would mean winning at a game once played with bones.

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Tucker Carlson's unredacted text reveals a surprising side of him: Does he have a better angel?

 By Hal Brown. MSW, retired psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist

Scroll down for May 7 update.

Click above to enlarge image

Below is the section of the previously redacted (above with my image added) portion of the message which contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing that is described in this NY Times article:

Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’

It is being discussed on "Morning Joe" as I write this blog:

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?

The line in the text, it's not how white men fight, that apparently alarmed Fox News executives expresses Carlson's racism. I wonder if Carlson was thinking of how Mike Tyson bit off a chuck of Evander Holyfield's ear when Holyfield. an underdog, was winning in their 1997 heavyweight championship boxing match.

It was the rest of the text that I think is surprising. Breaking it down:

* Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously.

This shows that Carlson can differentiate between what is honorable and dishonorable.

* I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.

This demonstrates an ability to engage in self-reflection, to express how he feels about something. It also shows he can admit his own murderous impulses.

* Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be.

Crucially, this shows that he is cognizant of when his thoughts deviate from an ego ideal. In Freudian psychoanalysis this is the inner image of oneself as one wants to become. In the id-ego-superego (or conscience) Freudian model the ego ideal is part of the superego, that is "the individual's conscious and unconscious images of what he would like to be, patterned after certain people whom ... he regards as ideal."

* The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?

The entire section above comes across as if it he has a better angel, his conscience, sitting on his shoulder whispering in his ear.

I don't view empathy as an either you have it or you don't characteristic. Some people, malignant narcissists for example, are incapable of experiencing empathy, period, full stop. Donald Trump fits all the indices of being a malignant narcissist. I do not think Trump has empathy for anybody.

I don't know if this is true of Carlson. He may have empathy for family members and his friends. 

There are people who are sociopaths who aren't at all narcissistic. I think of depictions of Mafiosi in fiction. They can kill or order a hit on someone and still feel deep love and empathy for their family. This doesn't mean family members and girlfriends can rest easy. Uncle Junior ordered a hit on Tony Soprano, Christopher regretfully ordered Sylvio  to kill his girlfriend Adriana.

Hitler, a psychopath who wasn't a grandiose narcissist like Trump, probably truly loved and had empathy for Eva Braun. He was extremely fond of his German Shepherd, Blondi, and even let her sleep in his bed in his bunker. Apparently Trump has never has a pet in his life.

I've digressed, so I ought to conclude with my clinical assessment of Tucker Carlson. 

I think he has many characteristics of malignant narcissism. He shares these with Donald Trump: extreme narcissism, antisocial behavior or sociopathy, sadism, being a bully, grandiosity, liking to raise hostility levels, and dehumanizing people and groups of people.

He is different from Trump in one respect, aside from being much more intelligent. He has an awareness that he is incapable of empathy and that to at least some degree knows he'd be a better person if he felt it.

Update: 

Scoop: Tucker Carlson ready to torch Fox News

My response:

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